Wittgenstein Jr

Lars Iyer

The book writer Hari Kunzru says “made me feel better about the Apocalypse than I have in ages” is back—with a hilarious coming-of-age love story

The unruly undergraduates at Cambridge have a nickname for their new lecturer: Wittgenstein Jr. He’s a melancholic, tormented genius who seems determined to make them grasp the very essence of philosophical thought.

But Peters—a Northerner surprised to find himself among the elite—soon discovers that there’s no place for logic in a Cambridge overrun by posh boys and picnicking tourists, as England’s greatest university is collapsing under market pressures.

Such a place calls for a derangement of the senses, best achieved by lethal homemade cocktails consumed on Cambridge rooftops. Peters joins his fellows as they attempt to forget about the void awaiting them after graduation, challenge one another to think so hard they die, and dream about impressing Wittgenstein Jr with one single, noble thought.

And as they scramble to discover what, indeed, they have to gain from the experience, they realize that their teacher is struggling to survive. For Peters, it leads to a surprising turn—and for all of them, a challenge to see how the life of the mind can play out in harsh but hopeful reality.

Combining his trademark wit and sharp brilliance, Wittgenstein Jr is Lars Iyer’s most assured and ambitious novel yet—as impressive, inventive and entertaining as it is extraordinarily stirring.

LARS IYER is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of two books on Blanchot (Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy, Politics and Blanchot’s Vigilance: Phenomenology, Literature, Ethics) and the novels Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus, known collectively as the Spurious Trilogy, about which The Spectator said, “There is a superfluous joy to these novels . . . They are satisfying paradoxes—‘difficult’ books which are consummately readable; exuberant books about bleakness.”

“Outstanding… [Iyer] appears to be in the process of creating his own personal genre, one in which the workings of his mind are on display far more brilliantly than anything as piddling as a plot… Almost every individual page is a pleasure, and that is more than enough reason to keep reading him.”
—Daily Beast

“An absolutely exquisite, elegant novel, with a cadence and rhythm all its own.”
—Emily St. John Mandel’s A Year in Reading, The Millions

“One of the funniest books of the year, this philosophical bildung shows that intellectuality can be poignant, especially when its couched within a campus novel.”
—Flavorwire, 50 Best Independent Fiction and Poetry Books of 2014

“Stunning. Wittgenstein Jr. is Iyer’s strongest book to date. He has again managed to write a book that’s funny, unexpected, and profound, and his prose is suffused with a calm beauty.”
—Emily St. John Mandel, The Millions

“It’s a triumph that Iyer pulls off this high-wire act so brilliantly. It’s irreverent, smart, and off-kilter.”
—John Yargo, The Millions

“Iyer’s prose is never any less stark than it can be, building a sharp momentum that brings the boys and their professor to a surprising yet fitting conclusion.”
—Ask Men, Recommended Reading for September

“Depression, sadness, gloom–these three themes permeate the novel, and the subtle prose conveys them with deftness.”
—PopMatters

“As finely put together as a watch, Wittgenstein Jr is a playful book of ideas by a brilliant man.”
—Elisabeth Donnelly, The Morning News

“Meanwhile, the novel is in crisis – and I intend that as a compliment. In other words, the books that are asking what a novel might be …[including] Lars Iyer’s Wittgenstein Jr – are by far the best.”
—Gaby Wood’s Best Books of 2014, The Telegraph (UK)

“Wittgenstein Jr really is very good entertainment — enjoyable reading, with just the right touch of gravity, good fun, but with a sense of the almost-profound in the shadows.”
—Complete Review

“Iyer’s lyrical novel unfolds like a prose poem, in fragments and scenes, compressed images and emotion, with rhythm and repetition that pull the reader through the novel… It is at turns a novel about England, the university, youth, madness, philosophy, love, which, when summed up, becomes a coming-of-age novel.”
—Hamlet Hub

“Fascinating… A doomy, hilarious, thoughtful Cambridge comedy with a tone somewhere between Philosophical Investigations and Porterhouse Blue, as a bunch of dreadful modern undergrads struggle to make sense of a tragic, saintlike tutor who is not Wittgenstein, or not exactly.”
—the Telegraph (UK), Best Books of 2014

“One of Britain’s best new voices.”
—The Bookseller (UK), Books of the Year

“A twitchy philosophy professor arrives at Cambridge on the brink of either total enlightenment or a mental breakdown. His new students, a hapless bunch of over-privileged boozers and junkies, turn up to class to observe their tutor’s rambling, paranoid disintegration. All ends well though, with an unexpected spot of non-theoretical romance.”
—Verso (UK), Books of the Year

“It isn’t really a novel, or not only a novel. It’s more interesting than that…Iyer has compiled an idiosyncratic – and surprisingly tender – paean to love and learning.”
—Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“The novel makes you feel a little sad, as any true story of first love would, and, as any book by a true philosopher would, gives you a lot of food for thought.”
—the Independent on Sunday (UK)

“Wittgenstein Jr is as much a satire on the contemporary academy as it is an existential novel of ideas. But is is also a love story. Ultimately it’s a novel about the idea of philosophy, about what Wittgenstein’s students call ’the romance of learning’ and that all-consuming erotic yearning for knowledge that you sometimes experience as an undergraduate. It is also an elegiac book.”
—the Telegraph (UK)

“Iyer’s work proposes a visibly different sort of British literature to that which dominates the discourse… The author has set an alternative path for himself, producing books you can read in an afternoon but think about for a year.”
—the Independent (UK)

”Written in Iyer’s now unmistakable musical prose Wittgenstein Jr provides a wonderful character study of one of the greatest philosophers of modern times, a hilarious take on modern life inside academia, a set of profane t-shirt slogans and a whole lot more besides.”
—The Quietus

“His cartoon of campus life is one of the joys of Iyer’s new-found freedom.”
—Steve Mitchelmore, This Space

“Without shortcuts, [Iyer] tries to show not only what is lost in the modern world, but what remains—what his characters retain even through their despair, because of their despair, even if they don’t know it. One might call it hope… Wittgenstein Jr walks a line between cynicism and optimism, between the laughable and the serious…I, for my part, found it hilarious.”
—The Quietus

”It was more than a book: it was a revelation, in that Biblical sense of words being exposed down to their meaning, to the deed in the world to which they referred.” —The Quietuson Exodus

“Exodus, which follows Spurious and Dogma, is the eminently satisfying and unexpectedly moving final installment in a truly original trilogy about two wandering British intellectuals —Lars and W., not to be confused with Lars Iyer and his real friend W., whom he’s been quoting for years on his blog — and their endless search for meaning in a random universe, for true originality of thought, for a leader, for better gin.” – The Millions’ most anticipated books of 2013

“It’s wonderful. I’d recommend the book for its insults alone.” —Sam Jordison, The Guardian